' Phantasmania ' on view at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

KANSAS CITY, MO - The exhibition Phantasmania, an impressive survey of 17 emerging artists, examines a distinct undercurrent in today’s artistic consciousness of anxiety, doom, and unrest brought on by world chaos and destruction, including war, terrorism, and natural and human-made disasters. Drawn from collections throughout the United States and Europe, the exhibition includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installation works that exude elements of the fantastical, the grotesque, and the unreal. Phantasmania is on view through August 19, 2007, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri—it’s only venue.

Primarily representative of a post-Vietnam generation new to wartime tumult and widespread social and political upheaval, the exhibition’s artists—most born in the mid-1970s—are responding to their irrational age with predominantly representational work that often glows with bright colors and hopeful exuberance, betraying its dark, sometimes apocalyptic content.

United by their common use of mostly playful fantasy and make-believe, these artists create psychologically charged realms suffused with a critique of reality. In a response to today’s pervasive climate of war, globalization, and rise of mediated information and experience, many of Phantasmania’s artists revert to rather dark interior worlds by creating narrative works influenced by fairy tales, dreams, mythologies, and personal and collective memories. Within these alternative realities, the artists meld representational imagery with elements of fantasy and the bizarre, thus creating a place to understand a world dominated by fear, strangeness, and social unrest.

This group of artists also shares a common interest and affection for modest handmade materials, craft, and low-tech media. Reflecting an anti-modern aesthetic, much of the included work rejects the slickness of technology and instead emphasizes the artist’s physical presence through the drawn line, painted mark, or hand-stitched fabric, often presented in traditional landscape and portraiture genres.

A wide aesthetic and conceptual net stretches between the two poles that define Phantasmania. At one end lies a retreat from the present through a rekindling of history, infused with Romantic ideas and attitudes; at the other end is an embrace and a recasting of contemporary pop culture, with its sugarcoated stylings and subjects.

A full-color, 96-page catalogue, with an essay by exhibition curator Elizabeth Dunbar and artist entries by Christopher Cook, Kemper Museum’s acting curator, Dunbar, and Becca Ramspott, independent arts writer, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue will sell in the Kemper Museum Shop and also will be available on line at www.kemperart.org.

Artists in Phantasmania
Dan Attoe (born 1978, lives in Washougal, Washington)
Jules de Balincourt (born 1972, lives in Brooklyn, New York)
John White Cerasulo (born 1974, lives in Brooklyn, New York)
Anna Conway (born 1973, lives in Brooklyn, New York)
Angela Fraleigh (born 1976, lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Brooklyn, New York)
James Benjamin Franklin (born 1972, lives in Brooklyn, New York)
Wendell Gladstone (born 1972, lives in Los Angeles, California)
Robert Gutierrez (born 1972, lives in San Francisco, California)
Adam Helms (born 1974, lives in Brooklyn, New York)
Elizabeth Huey (born 1971, lives in Brooklyn, New York)
Kelly McLane (born 1968, lives in Los Angeles, California)
Shiri Mordechay (born 1974, lives in New York, New York)
Robyn O’Neil (born 1977, lives in Houston, Texas)
Lamar Peterson (born 1974, lives in New York, New York)
Jon Pylypchuk (born 1972, lives in Los Angeles, California, and Winnepeg, Canada)
Matthew Ronay (born 1976, lives in Brooklyn, New York)
Andrew Sendor (born 1977, lives in Brooklyn, New York)

Thank you
The Kemper Museum acknowledges the generous support of Bank of America for the 2007 Visiting Artists Program. Financial assistance has been provided by Arvin Gottlieb Charitable Foundation, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee; Hallmark Corporate Foundation; Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation; David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation; William T. Kemper Foundation—Commerce Bank, Trustee; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; and Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts—Commerce Bank, Trustee. Generous in-kind support is provided by Kansas City Marriott Country Club Plaza, The Kansas City Star, and Midwest Airlines.

About the Kemper Museum
Kansas City’s acclaimed, free contemporary art museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 and draws more than 130,000 visitors each year. The Museum boasts a rapidly growing permanent collection of modern and contemporary works of artists from around the world. The Museum hosts temporary exhibitions, installations, performance work, film and video series, lectures, concerts, children’s workshops, and other creative programs designed to both entertain and challenge. For more information, visit www.kemperart.org .